Category: GNOME

Four OSes, One Mac Redux

Seems the Theora version really didn’t want to play outside of Quicktime. Courtesy of ffmpeg, here’s a DivX version that works in VLC on Gutsy out of the box, at least (just checked it)… poorer quality and the aspect ratio’s gone a bit squiffy, but what the heck. I don’t really function properly before 10am, and it’s really not that exciting anyway 🙂

EDIT: Thanks to Arek for pointing out the blindingly obvious, here’s a proper Linux and Solaris-friendly OGG version. Yay 🙂

Sun’s Web App UI Guidelines

Cool to see Sun’s Web App UI Guidelines finally go public. As Chip Alexander says,:

They are a set of building blocks for web applications that have been designed by user interface specialists, thoroughly thought through and usability tested. They can be used for developing full web applications, allowing designers and developers to focus on their application’s particular needs rather than the design of all the controls and elements inside.

The corresponding Woodstock toolkit for which they were written has been available under an open source (CDDL) licence for a while, but of course the guidelines themselves can be applied to any web app. (They do have a bit of a system administration app slant, though, for obvious reasons.)

VMware 1, Parallels 0

I’d been using Parallels 3.0 for the past few weeks to run SXDE 2 on my MacBook Pro, but started having problems when I upgraded to Solaris Nevada build 69– the X server wouldn’t start any more, and I just couldn’t get it going at all.I took the opportunity to try out the VMware Fusion Beta instead, and so far it’s the clear winner.

It does feel a trifle slower than Parallels (even with debugging turned off), and its snapshots aren’t as flexible, only allowing one per VM. But its VM tools for Solaris are way ahead of Parallels’ non-existent offering– clock sync, on-the-fly desktop resize, copy/paste/drag+drop from Solaris <-> OS X… nice. (Haven’t figured out if shared folders are supposed to work on Solaris yet or not– the settings are available which suggest they should, but the folders I’ve nominated don’t show up anywhere obvious, so I’m guessing they don’t.)

Assuming it’s just as happy at full screen on my Sun 24″ display when I get into the office, I’ll be sticking in the VMware camp for now.

Edit: Oh, and did I mention that Solaris sound and networking work out-of-the-box on VMware too…?

The Usability Clinic is Closed

Big thanks to Máirín and particularly Garrett (as he hadn’t even volunteered beforehand) for helping me field the questions, and apologies to anyone who’d brought along something to ask or show us that we didn’t get to this time. Feel free to email me or the usability list instead (or in Alberto‘s case, just ask me in the office…)

Unfortunately that’s the last I’ll be seeing of GUADEC this year… off to visit friends in Birmingham tomorrow morning, and back to Dublin tomorrow evening. Bring on Istanbul!

Update: To the guys who asked me about keyboard layout switcher shortcuts, I was mistaken about OpenSolaris– I was thinking about input method switching, we don’t currently have a shortcut for layout switching AFAIK. (Or even a GUI, as IIRC the standard GNOME one is currently too broken on Solaris.) I still can’t think of a reason why Shift+Alt wouldn’t be okay as a default shortcut, but I’ll have to think about that a bit more…

UI Patterns

The suggestion of designing some UI patterns for GNOME came up in tigert’s talk on Monday… I mentioned at the time that we’d already started working on this, so just for the record, here’s the list.You’ll notice we haven’t actually done any mockups yet, so feel free to start proposing some designs, or just add anything to the list that you think would be useful.

Sidelined

Bit disappointed to be sitting out the FreeFA World Cup this year, especially as I’d presumably have been lining up in the menacing black kit– I have a dodgy shoulder at the moment though and I know what these “friendlies” are like!

Having only contributed one goal en route to the final last year though (albeit a sweetly-struck volley with my wrong foot), I doubt I’ll be that badly missed.

WP conversion buglet?

So, when you used to add comments in NewsBruiser, you could enter a URL for your website, as is the norm. I was usually lazy and didn’t bother typing the http:// part at the beginning, though– still worked fine when you clicked on it.

Unfortunately, the conversion to WP has apparently treated all those URLs as relative… which might be technically correct in other contexts, but doesn’t really make sense in this one. Anyway, the upshot is that if you click on my name in a comment I’ve made to any pre-WP entry on your blog or mine, you’ll probably get directed to http://that-page’s-url/blogs.gnome.org/calum, which obviously doesn’t exist. D’oh.

IBM scale back a11y contribution

IBM announced last week that they’re scaling back their efforts on open source accessibility projects. As one of the major contributors to this area over the past few years, they’ll certainly leave a bit of a hole if the community doesn’t rally round to help fill it. There’s often a perception that accessibility is “one of those things that Sun or IBM will take care of”, but this announcement (along with Bill Haneman, the “accessibility name” that GNOME folks may be most familiar with, recently moving on from Sun) should make it clear that it’s not the case, nor was it ever meant to be.

The Ubuntu accessibility team are doing a great job now too, but now would be a good time for anyone who writes GNOME software to re-acquaint themselves with the basic accessibility requirements and testing tools, to help spread the load somewhat.Check out this thread on gnome-accessibility-list for more reaction and thoughts on continuing to move open source accessibility forward.